Love in Daylight
by newtypeshadow
Summary: Postwar. Harry and Draco are together, but their love is not the stuff of Hollywood or fairy tales. slash


**Title:** Love in Daylight  
**Notes:** written while listening to _Arrow _by Cheryl Wheeler, in response to dorrie6's challenge. Edited to Coldplay's _Clocks_.

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If things were fair, if life were a book or a Hollywood picture, Draco would be beautiful, with the dark mystery of a morally ambiguous hero wrapped around him like a cloak. His hair would shine and slither about his shoulders like the sigil of his house. His eyes would be the piercing blue of ocean waves kissed by sunlight, and his mouth would, when not sneering beautifully, be soft to the touch and curve sometimes in secret smiles. If their lives were a movie, Harry would be tall, his hair artfully mussed, and his scar would not stand out in such stark relief from his tan, perfect skin. His nose would be straighter, his jaw strong and proud, and he would stand out in crowds not because he was the Boy Who Lived, but simply because he is Harry Potter. 

Life isn't a book or a Hollywood film, though. Harry is not the protagonist. He is a catalyst and a symbol, and he is not the only one. The papers call him reclusive and crazy as much as they laud him for heroics and his uncanny ability to survive the tightest circumstances. Harry will never be in the top fifty of Witch Weekly's Most Attractive Bachelors, and neither will his boyfriend be written about with anything but scorn. Harry will never be tall; years of malnourishment and exposure to dark magic have stunted his growth and left him with wire instead of muscle, and an ache in his joints when rain is coming. He is a scrawny man, a gangly mass of unsure limbs and weedy hair, too-thick glasses and hunched shoulders. He will never be invisible and, unlike his father, he wishes he could be.

If this were a movie Harry would be richer than he is, and Draco would be helping him pay for food and extremities instead of staring out from the second floor window of Godrick's Hollow as if his world truly _is_ over, and having Harry makes no difference. Draco's accounts wouldn't be frozen because of his father's unpopular allegiances; his mother would not have taken poison with her afternoon tea shortly before the Ministry came knocking; Lucius Malfoy would not have received a Dementor's kiss on the battlefield from a dark creature on his own side of the chaos.

Draco would be energetic as he always was in school. He would be short with Harry's friends, barely tolerate the company of Gryffindors, and his pale skin would not have taken on a sickly pallor over the course of his seventh year. His eyes would not be muddy gray as he stared through things as though already dead. If life were fair, Draco's face would not be so pinched. He would not harbor a secret sympathy for ferrets. His heart would not stutter and his lungs stop working when he looks blearily into the mirror in the mornings and sees his father emerging naked from the bedroom he shares with Harry.

He and Harry would not fight. Draco wouldn't use his words like a wand, his knowledge of Harry like a blade turning back on the man who looks so tired these days, so much more fragile than he did in school. If this were a movie the two might go out for walks, sit for hours "getting to know each other" or take a vacation far from magic and talk of the vanquished Dark Lord. They would have a special song, and a post-war honeymoon filled with sex and giggling lazy afternoons.

But this isn't a movie. Their life together is a far cry from a fairy tale, unless one includes those original stories that entertained grown men around campfires miles from the nearest house. Harry wakes up screaming and Draco wakes up suffocating. They keep their wands in a latched shelf in the bathroom, because even though Harry's wandless magic is powerful enough to throw Draco across the room in a fit of panic, they're both so used to waking up with a spell on their lips that allowing their wands to be within grabbing distance-or even a short _Accio_ away-is an invitation to carelessly calculated injury.

The mornings neither of them gets out of bed, there is no sex or laughter. They remain locked around each other as the sunlight encroaches, creeping across the floor and up the covers, highlighting every scar on Harry's thin body, every imperfection on Draco's face, the drool on the pillow that neither will claim. They ignore Hedwig's letters, her ruffling feathers as she turns her beak up and flies to her perch in the living room. They don't speak often. Their conversations slide in and out like waves, tapering off to nothing and crashing back in again minutes or hours later. Fingers absently stroke to the rise and fall of hairless chests; eyelashes caress in slow blinks; breath comfortably warms patches of skin that freeze with every jarring inhale; growling stomachs are ignored until they quiet. Perhaps Draco, perhaps Harry, wonders if the man he grips with deceptive laziness would be as comfortable with any other warm body; if the wizarding world is worthy of the man whose hair he absently toys with; if it wouldn't be better for them both to simply never wake up.

Some nights they fight so fiercely that Draco is forced to turn from his window, or Harry from his mindless inhalation of photo book after photo book, and they throw things and destroy rooms, cut each other so deeply inside the sex they have afterwards feels like each is trying to split the other apart, to connect the wounds they've made in each others' hearts to the body outside clawing its way in.

Their love is far from storybook. Each feels the other is dying slowly while they watch with tired eyes. And yet, it is their life, and their love. They have fought for it, suffered for it, and they have crawled away with victory cutting deep into their bloody palms. Their love has seen better days, yes, but neither truly wishes to give up.


End file.
